‘Did you know that a beer bottle fits perfectly inside an empty can of snow-peas?’
‘What are you on about?’ Claire replied, vocally severing the prefix off of the word nonplussed and tossing the lexical fragment into a bin, ‘Please don’t tell me this is how you spent the day, Martin, you were supposed to build the McArdles’ fence…and why are you still buying tinned peas?’ Dropping a bundle of half-wet phone books onto the counter, Claire made for the fridge and retrieved a beer for herself.
‘It’s raining, do you see that,’ Claire continued, choosing to not engage with the fact her partner was lackadaisically measuring a tin can with a pair of vernier callipers, ‘It’s no weather for delivering, I’d lose half the A’s before I left the car and then it would be a tragedy from X to Z if no one was home.’
‘Are there many Zeds in Ballybracken then?’ Martin spoke, choosing not to look up from the hazy number he was still attempting to decipher, ‘I don’t remember them in the last census.’ Abandoning whatever breakthrough of recycling he moments away from and in letting out a lion’s yawn, Martin rolled back into the swaddling of blankets he had constructed for himself and beamed a satisfied smile; there was always something about the sound of rain that would made him feel rested.
‘And anyway, if you can’t deliver phone books how can a man build a fence? The rain falls on other heads too.’
‘And your arse has the same cheek as either side of your tongue, ye’ scarecrow.’
Knocking her partner’s feet off their couch and settling down, Claire kicked off her work boots and frowned at how much mud she had failed to leave outside: two neat pairs of footprints followed her path through the house and waited expectantly at her side as if they were a storybook bloodhound, Fridays always had one last painful thing to remember them by.
Days were varied for the sole telecom worker in the county and as an already understaffed call centre had found her unable to decline ‘adjacently important leg-work’, Claire had been beginning to wonder if spellchecking each phone book before delivering them was a part her university degree.
‘Seven times I’ve fixed the line to the hall,’ Claire drifted off, staring into the middle distance of a day that was, ‘I swear someone keeps putting the tree back up with a tractor or something; It’s on the ground, how does it keep taking down the wire?’
Putting down the callipers, Martin offered up the empty tin can in a half-hearted cheers and then kicked a blanket over Claire’s legs.
A frown, a wry smile, and a soft amount of name calling preluded the sound of a bottle clinking against tin.
‘The thing about history,’ Martin pontificated with an exaggerated poshness, ‘is that when it decides to do something noteworthy, it never considers logistics first. Ergo, your thrice fallen, twice risen stump is, itself, the action of hypothesis. Young Clair, you are encroaching upon the realm of becoming historic, or, as I might prefer to say, hysteric~.’
Drawing out the fully voweled speech of a teacher that the couple had known many years ago, both Martin and Clair began to laugh with the relief of a memory coloured in sepia. They had lived through so many of these moments together, and occasionally had to pause when one bloomed into a flower of nostalgia.
So long ago had everything been monolithic; the circles they walked within, the choice of countless futures, it was as if they were struggling to catch up with an adult world already charging toward its own disintegration.
But they knew that it was common story that awaited them, one of two people finding a home, one of two tired people finding that work had overtaken times of joy and now they had suddenly become old.
‘Why are you eating tinned peas for lunch anyway?’ Claire led, knowing that the answer was going to be irritating, but happy enough to just have a mindless conversation for the moment. There was something beautiful about sitting on the couch, saying nothing, and staring at the rain pattering against the window, it was comfortable.
‘Out of beans,’ Martin replied while scratching at the coarse hairs of his chin and grimacing as if in mock contemplation, ‘If I knew that you’d be home early I’d have saved you some; I think they’ve got the potential to be the worst meal that I’ve eaten this week, but we’ll see what tomorrow brings.’ Pausing and looking at his partner who was lost in thought for a moment Martin prodded her with his foot and tried to tease out a reply.
‘Hey, buddy? We’re out of peas now too.’
‘I’ll call for a priest to get John Lennon on the phone, he’ll know what to do.’ Dropping her beer bottle into an empty can upon the table, Clare leant over for a kiss and instead burped in her partner’s face.
‘You’re right about the tin-bottle thing, love, they fit together perfectly. I should start to call you my little tin can.’ Claire finished, patting Martin on the head, and giving him a short peck for being a good sport.
‘You’ve lost me there bottle breath,’ Martin said while making a weak attempt to grab the en-tinned beer off the coffee table while Claire was teasing him, ‘what does Lennon have to do with peas?’
Giving up on a subtle theft he waited for a moment for her to reply and then suddenly pushed her away with his leg, swooping upon the bottle as if it were a sleeping pigeon seconds away from meeting a falcon.
‘Because he gives peas a chance–Ah, piss off ye feck, get your own!’
Day become night and the memory of what has passed becomes faded, the sunrise creating a new sheet of life to draw upon. No matter how the age of time progresses, each reflection will be lined by the creases of remembrance, memory only holding fragments of the arrow’s strike, or the joyful moment after ‘I do’.
But it is within these small moments that we become whole, it is here that we breath the air of the present and look to both the past and to the future. In this moment, this cherished fraction of a lifetime, will see the sun once again.
A new page will be drawn.
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 